I’m still alive

Hmm…where to start.

Well…I really only managed to get a few small projects done this winter:

Replaced brake master cylinder with new Reman’d master cylinder as mine was leaking
Installed OEM JDM manual seat belts and A/B/C pillar plastic that eliminates the power seat belts and the gaps from the OEM power seat belts
Installed Tomei short shifter with all new gaskets/boots and Cusco brass shifter bushing

I got the master cylinder on and bled the system last weekend so I took it out for the first time in almost 6 months.  Felt awesome to drive the thing again, I just forgot how rough it rode lol.  Back was killing me.

I’m only working one job now that I’m in grad school and unfortunately while I have this huge pile of parts waiting to go on the car, they are parts of several different projects; all of which need more money/parts to complete. Whether it’s powdercoating, more parts needed to do the project start-finish in one go or something, a lot of the big things will have to slowwwwly trickle in over the next year.  Being around Damon’s build has been a huge inspiration to me, and I cannot wait to take this thing apart and start improving things.  I might delete the ABS and put the Z32 brakes on in June after I go up to see Damon, we’ll just have to see if I have it in the budget to finish the Z32 project since I still need both PMU Z32 rear rotors and PMU brake pads front and rear, plus powdercoating for the calipers themselves.

 

Anyway, thanks for checking in!  I’ll try not to fall off the face of the earth again.

Dream come true

What I’ve been up to….

Well it’s been a while since I’ve updated this, been busy being a scumbag and what not. In reality work and school have both been insane lately, so I’ve just had my head down trying to get by. I have been scooping up some cool parts though. Picked up a 6 pt cusco cage. I am planning to have a harness bar welded on to this so that one day I can run a harness without worrying about destroying my back should I feel the need to run one. Then I will have the powdercoated gloss black (it’s currently “cusco blue”). I also picked up some Project Mu Club Racer rotors from Russell at Nissanparts.cc. They really are pretty cheap for PMu parts. Those should be here around the middle of November hopefully. The last thing I got recently was a Tomei short shifter. It was between that and a Nismo Solid Shifter but the coolness/rareness of the Tomei just won over.

Anyway, the only work I’ve done recently to the car is to start tearing down my spare subframe to have it powdercoated. It came with all the stock arms that have never been removed so I’ve been breaking those loose with a 1/2 inch breaker bar and a hammer over the last few days. Here are some pictures of the progress:

Here is where I started:

This has got to be one of the few subframes left with intact bushings. I’ll be burning these out and replacing with polyurethane

Here is where I called it a night after I hurt my back after trying to remove the inner upper control arm bolts. Those eceentric washers are the spawn of satan.

Traction arms off brakes off, and pretty much one of the 2 bolts on each arm has been broken loose. Doesn’t look like much but it took a little while. These things took some elbow grease to get out. I need to track down a socket to remove the axles next. The CV boots are in good shape so I’ll refinish the axle shafts probably and then use those.

One last little thing I did was to replace the clips on my door sill plates. Some were missing, some were nasty. It just bugged me, so I picked up some new ones from Nissan.

Before:

After:

Got the exhaust on…

OK time for another update. I actually worked on the car a little this time instead of just taking pictures of everything piled up.

Ok so here is what my ground clearance looked like with the factory exhaust. Part of the reason I was doing the exhaust ws to gain ground clearance since I’m tearing up my garage floor when I pull out of it.

And here is what the back of the car looks like with factory exhaust:

I ended up picking up a set of circuit sports exhaust hanger bushings with hopes that it will bring the exhaust up a little higher. These are polyurethane so they’re quite a bit stiffer than the old clapped out factory pieces.

I don’t have a whole lot of progress pictures so I’ll just write a book about what went down.

After spending a little bit getting the car all jacked up and supported properly it was time to tear into it. I’ve recently developed a phobia of being under cars (doesn’t bode well for my HICAS removal project this winter…) so I tried to make sure everything was supported properly. I put the rear wheels on the race ramps wheel cribs (these aren’t my pictures, I googled them to show you guys what I did):

The put the front wheels on the Race Ramps Roll ups and chocked them front and rear on both sides.

Now that the car was all ready to go, it was time to start pulling off the ol’ trusty OEM exhaust. Surprisingly it was in decent shape. One of the mufflers was rusty on the side and had cracked but not too bad. It has to be one of the few factory exhausts left haha. I pulled that guy down and saws-all’ed it up so the garbage man would take it away in the morning. Next was working with the new exhaust. It’s a 2 piece design that uses a slip joint in the middle with springs to hold it together. I coated the joint with heat resistant anti-seize so hopefully it isn’t too hard to pull apart should I ever need to.

Next I put on the exhaust hanger bushings. I couldn’t find my trusty can of silicone to spray in these to make installation easier, so I went ghetto and just used the next slickest thing I could think of: Tire Shine. It ended up working pretty well. So I got the exhaust all mounted up and good to go. Here are some pictures:

A little more ground clearance but I may end up either having my downpipe bent by an exhaust shop so that it tucks up higher by where the cat would be or just going with a PBM Cobra 2 downpipe.

And one picture of the car after I finished buttoning everything up:

While I was under the car I found out why my speedometer wasn’t working: the speed sensor was very loose int he transmission. So I tightened that guy up and continued looking around for other little things to fix. I noticed my frame rails had pretty much all of the undercoating ground off from sliding across crappy driveways and what not, so while I’m under there this winter with everything apart I’ll be undercoating everything. Now I’m saving up for all SPL Pro V3 arms and maybe some NISMO lower control arms and a whiteline sway bar.

It’s raining cool parts!

Figured I’d post a small update of the “parts are showing up” sort. Haven’t worked on the car much, been crazy busy with school.

So here’s what I’ve had show up in the last week.

-Ganador Mirrors
-Buddy Club Spec 2
-RS*R Bushing kit
-300ZX Rear caliper rebuilt kit
-Circuit Sport exhaust hanger bushings

Ordered a Bride Zeta 3. That will be here Friday. Shipped my PowerFC off to A’PEXi japan to have that refurbished.

A’PEXi Intake / Z32 MAF

Small update: Put on my A’PEXi Z32MAF Intake and Z32 MAF tonight. Pretty sure the MAF I bought off a dude on here is bad.

The car will start then lope real bad then shut off. If I unplug the MAF, it runs fine. When I used a multimeter and measured pin-to-pin on it, it had the same readings as when I did the same measurement on my bad Z32 MAF from my coupe when I fried all of the electronics in it last year.

Speaking of frying the coupe, when I did that, I also fried the PowerFC I had in the car, so it’s been a nice desk ornament since then. Well recently a friend of mine did the same thing I did (hooked the battery up backwards) on his SR’d/PowerFC’d car and it fried his PowerFC as well. He called A’PEXi USA and apparently you can ship the PFC back to them and they will forward it on to A’PEXi Japan and they’ll repair it for about 150 bucks with around a 2 month turn around time. So in other words, I’ll be doing that as both this car and my coupe had Redtop SR’s, then I’ll be putting that PFC in this car once I get it back.

I redid the MAF wiring too when I was wiring in the new plug, it wasn’t….how I would have done it. So at least that’s a little better now.

I also sold my Bride Zeta 3 Sport today, so I’m going to get that shipped out for the dude and probably order a Red Zeta 3 or 2 soon. I’m extremely excited to finally have a Zeta 3 instead of a Zeta 3 Sport as that’s what I’ve always had. Cool seat and all, but the Zeta 3 has the nicer fabric, finish, etc. I really want a Zeta 2 but I don’t think it’s going to happen this time around.

Ok if you made it through all of that, congrats. It is probably rambley. Here are a few pictures as a reward.

Does anyone need this SR20 MAF / A’PEXi intake? I think the SR MAF either needs cleaned or is starting to go bad (I’ll just say that up front so you don’t get screwed like I did) but the intake piece is obviously fine.

A few random pictures from tonight

Put in my Next Miracle X-Brace tonight without the C-Pillar bar. Got burnt out on modifying the C-Pillar bar to work with it, so I just put it in by itself. Hopefully you folks appreciate the fact that I dusted off my DSLR instead of just using my iPhone for these pics. Have to do a shoot for canibeat for a friend’s RX7 next week so I gotta shake the cob webs out.

I usually have my backseat in the upright position but I wanted to get a better view of all of my recent stuff haha. With the seat up, the miracle sits right along the back of it. It’s pretty cool.

First go at upholstery..

Last night I had my first go at wrapping some stuff in Bride fabric. I started with the glovebox and good lord that thing showed me who was boss. I think I spent a total of 4 hours working on it. Toby got quite a lot of enjoyment out of watching me struggle I think. Anyway, here are some progress pictures.

What I started off with

After pulling the nasty stained stinky tweed off. When you do this, the tweed separates from the backing (yellow stuff) so to prevent any lumps I sanded down all of the high spots.

Mocking up the fabric so that the bride logos are level with the bottom of the glovebox and not slanted like they were on my coupe

Top part glued down, about to start stretching

Toby made me this little “tongue” or trim piece as he called it to help finish off the area on under the handle. Also put a fresh coat of Landau Black on the handle itself

Finished and reassembled

Back in the car

Another showing the arm rest, which I did second and was much easier.

The red is definitely very grabby. I’m hoping when I get the door cards done they kind of tone the glovebox and arm rest down a little. Otherwise I’ll have to get red Zeta 3’s.

My thumbs are killing me from all that fabric stretching. And that stuff is made out of kevlar I swear, such a pain to cut.

Might have another super small update tonight of the “hey I bolted a part on” sort, we’ll see.

I ordered some more stuff for the car, A’PEXi Z32 MAF intake, some random little interior clips that I was bummed I was missing like the ones on the sill plate, Circuit Sports exhaust hanger bushings and then a Z32 rear caliper rebuild kit.

Oh and I’m really regretting the gray dmax floormats now btw. Knew I should have gone red.

Interior is about to get a little more excite

Got 2 sheets of red Bride Logo fabric in the other day. So I’ll be wrapping the door card inserts, glovebox and arm rest in that before too long here. Can’t wait to get rid of the last bit of tweed in the interior. I also got my JDM seatbelts / interior plastics in from Matt the other day. No headliner yet to get rid of the gaps, still working out shipping with a guy from Canada, hopefully it’s not too insane.

Man I really need some good updated pictures of this thing. Oh I also ordered some Energy Suspension Urethane subframe bushings today too. Right now the rear bushings are super trashed, so I can’t wait to get those in. I’ll be putting them in at the same time I do my non-HICAS subframe/HICAS delete and S15 dif that I picked up from Toby. If anyone wants my fairly low miles, good condition Cusco 2-Way diff, let me know.

Miracle

Wanted one of these for close to 10 years. In the process of modifying my GTSPEC c-pillar bar to work with the x bar. Then I’ll be stripping and polishing the c pillar bar.